Whats everyone reading?

[Skullmo]

Just read The Flith - really really enjoyed it.

And the followed that up with Flex Mentallo. Also excellent

[Dark Jimbo]

Just finished Richardo Delgardo's (what a name!) Age of Reptiles Omnibus. All I can say is DINOTASTIC!!!!

Well actually I can say a but more, some of the finish storytelling around. Its only fault is being wordless its as quick a read as Jason, though you can get lost in the art for hours... oh sod it...

DINOTASTIC!!!!!

Brilliant! Not enough people have read that. Your favourite of the three, Colin, out of interest...?

[Colin YNWA]

I'm tempted to say 'The Hunt' as I love Allosaurus, the aerial scene is just breath taking and the scope of it more 'personal', oh and the ending is just superb... but maybe 'The Journey'... oh tough question... not Tribal War, which is good and all, but its not that one!

[Dandontdare]

Just read The Flith - really really enjoyed it.

heh yes, this is always been one of my faves. Totally bonkers, but I've lent it to people who have hated it.

[PreacherCain]

Just finished Richardo Delgardo's (what a name!) Age of Reptiles Omnibus. All I can say is DINOTASTIC!!!!

Well actually I can say a but more, some of the finish storytelling around. Its only fault is being wordless its as quick a read as Jason, though you can get lost in the art for hours... oh sod it...

DINOTASTIC!!!!!

Brilliant! Not enough people have read that. Your favourite of the three, Colin, out of interest...?

I read this last week too and loved it! I think the first story was my favourite, though it's The Journey that I keep thinking back to. Don't think the colouring was as good in the second story but the artwork throughout was fantastic.

I ended up having a nightmare that night about being eaten by a dinosaur too. So it clearly made an impression on me 

[Daveycandlish]

I'm reading this
http://forums.2000adonline.com/index.php/topic,37446.0.html

It really is rather good - go and buy it. Support one of our own!

[SmallBlueThing]

Salem Brownstone, by (muttermutter), borrowed from the children's library- a big old hardback, black and white graphic novel, about the titular shyster who inherits his dead magician father's house (or 'manse', as the book continually calls it) and so gets sucked into an occult nightmare of circus freaks, attack-dog monsters the 'shadow boys', and a horrific underground (i think) city populated by mad scheming giants. Or anyway, that's what it seems to be about- im halfway through.

To be honest, much of the time this reads like the result of a talented english student meeting a talented art student and them deciding to do a graphic novel on the grounds ir must be easy and mummy has links in publishing. The writing is forty years old, with over-written captions and everything explained for the reader endlessly, whether it appears in the panel or not. But this is probably what comics look like in your head, if you've not read one since you were a kid and have zero respect for the medium.

The art is (cont)

[SmallBlueThing]

(cont) endearingly amateurish, but with flashes of sheer creepy brilliance. Page after page of clumsy panels, and then suddenly it'll hit you with something absolutely terrifying and/or so well-designed, that flows so well, it'll make you gasp. The first view of the 'second city', all grey-tones and mad giants, is one such page.

In truth, i dont know what to make of this. Alan Moore liked it, and is quoted on the back saying comics should maybe be like this, but i cant help think it's maybe an out of context comment intended to inspire a promising student. I don't know- im halfway through, but i do hope to finish it- which is more than i do lot of this kind of thing these days. Worth a look, anyway.

SBT

[Charlie boy]

Recently finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*, which I never really had much of an interest in but different friends who have opinions I listen to had all read it and gave reviews- some good, some bad- so I decided to give it a go and got the whole trilogy because it was on offer. I didn't think much of the first part at all, maybe because I read Thomas Harris's excellent Red Dragon years back and now every investigative piece of fiction will be compared to that in my mind, maybe because I just didn't particularly care for any of the major characters! I started reading the sequel and got a couple of chapters in before deciding I had no interest, so the trilogy has been donated to Oxfam and I'll soon be starting The Exorcist.
*Did anybody else who read this think the dragon tattoo was of incredibly little significance? The wasp tattoo seems more important and the actual dragon tattoo isn't mentioned until around page 300 of a book around 400 pages in length!

[TordelBack]

Spurred on by very mixed feelings about Supergods (about which more later), I decided to tackle The Invisibles, a comic I never warmed to when it was running and for some reason have never gone back to check on.  Armed with an understanding of what Grant (claims he) was up to, and somewhat inoculated by long-term exposure to The Legendary Shark, I grabbed Books 1 and 2 from the library to see how it all turned out on paper... and couldn't put them down.  Initially unimpressed with the ghastly oik that is Dane/Jack, and the poncey Mary Sue that is King Mob, I very rapidly Got With The Programme.  Terrific stuff, and not at all what I was expecting - Lord Fanny in particular is enthralling.

Hard to credit that this stuff is 20 years old, except where you can see the half-understood influence it has had on lesser creations like The Matrix and a good chunk of Vertigo's weaker output, and apart from the period colouring job. 

Dear grud, the colouring. 

I can't imagine what technical limitations Danny Vozzo was labouring under in the early '90s, but how many otherwise good-looking books did his flat tope and grey blocks and three shades of purple and orange deface and obscure?  If this is all he could get out of the processes why did anyone bother with colour at all? And if they were going to sacrifice line art to this paint-by-numbers shite, why couldn't they get it right?  Almost ever page has randomly changing skin colours, vanishing facial hair on major characters, clothes that swap colours between wide and close-ups, feck it's awful.  And don't try to tell me it's deliberately unsettling and slippery, 'cos no-one is that good.

I'm sick of looking at it, I can tell you that. 

Anyway, even the colour improves marginally as we move through Vol 2, somebody mercifully decides to let Jill Thompson ink her own work (rescuing her lovely spidery hatching from a succession of unsympathetic and monotonous .50 nibs), and stalwarts like Parkhouse, Weston and Ridgway arrive to show everyone how you can survive having your work painted over by a roller daubed with Dulux's Ribena Vomit range.

By the end of Vol 2 I'm hooked and want more.
   

[I, Cosh]

Great stuff TB. The first volume of The Invisibles (I think that's up to the third collection) is one of my favourite comic things and one I can regularly reread and find something new.  I like it all, but it's those ones I love the most. It probably helped that I loved Dane from the start: he's the complete opposite of that little twat from Books of Magic.
There was a thread a couple of years ago where a few people ended up rereading it and trying to answer some of the questions you're left with but, unsurprisingly, I can't find it.

One terrible consequence of reading it in trades is you miss out on the classic letter column where Grant exhorts the dwindling readership to masturbate in an attempt to halt the decline.

Hard to credit that this stuff is 20 years old, except where you can see the half-understood influence it has had on lesser creations like The Matrix and a good chunk of Vertigo's weaker output, and apart from the period colouring job.

I'd be a bit more sympathetic to Morrison's complaints about this sort of thing if The Invisibles itself didn't owe such a massive debt to the Illuminatus books and if the whole Barbelith sequence in #16 wasn't an almost straight lift from Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors. Luckily I hadn't read either of those before the Invisibles and I don't really mind as they're all good (and Grant's Jesus gets better lines) but what goes around comes around: "So we return and begin again."

[O Lucky Stevie!]

The Invisibles? That's The Tomorrow People with swears, innit? 

Which, In Stevie's book, is most decidedly a mighty good thing.

As chance would have it* Stevie's recent purchase of the oversized omnibus edition has this set for a re-read straight after he has finished Stephen Baxter's wondrous The Wheel Of Ice.

Dear grud, the colouring. 

Absolutely agreed with you on that one TB. It is especially difficult to reconcil Vozzo's work on the title withthe sort of magic he was conjuring on the Ramadan issue of Sandman & the all the different palettes invoked when the Doom Patrol enter The Painting That Ate Paris during the two years previous.

 

One terrible consequence of reading it in trades is you miss out on the classic letter column where Grant exhorts the dwindling readership to masturbate in an attempt to halt the decline.

The omnibus has it (ahem) in the rear.


*Or is it now?

[TordelBack]

...I loved Dane from the start: he's the complete opposite of that little twat from Books of Magic.

This very simple aspect of the book is extraordinarily clever in establishing the tone and themes (as I understand them).  There are your standard anti-heroes, and then there are intensely antagonistic unsympathetic gits like Dane.  I was shaking my head at his inconsistencies, misapprehensions and general stupidities (burning a library, the unmitigated fucker) for the first several episodes, and then it suddenly clicked just what a great character he is, and how well thought-out his unheroic escapades are.  It's L'il Zenith taken to inspiring extremes, and then pushed beyond.

Yeah, it's good stuff.  Can't wait for my inter-library request to bear fruit!

Also on the boil courtesy of my anonymous fairy godfather in the county libraries system, Mary Talbot and Brian Talbot's extraordinary Dotter of her Father's Eyes.  It might sound like gross sentimentality, but halfway through reading this amazing and unique piece of work they shoved my relationship with my own wee daughter right in my face, and one of those rare but shocking epiphanies rolled down from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes to irrevocably change every cell of my body.  I'm going to write to Mary and Brian and thank them for actually altering how I see and live my life, but first I want to read it again.  Recommended.

[Charlie boy]

Haven't read The Invisibles for a while. I remember it being good but I also remember being annoyed at Morrison hinting at things/bring something in which you think will be important but it soon seems forgotten about.

[Skullmo]

Just read The Flith - really really enjoyed it.

heh yes, this is always been one of my faves. Totally bonkers, but I've lent it to people who have hated it.

I can see how it would divide people!

I thought that it worked really well. A lot of the reviews on amazon said that it was disjointed but I think that was intentional.